Is this for Quorum, their fork of Ethereum? Did they just fork ethereum, add untraceable private data privacy on a private chain, and try to patent it? Hasn't

Is this for Quorum, their fork of Ethereum? Did they just fork ethereum, add untraceable private data privacy on a private chain, and try to patent it? Hasn't ripple been doing basically exactly this -- what the patent application describes -- for more than 5 years? Note: I read the quoted claims from what is probably this patent application on CoinDesk a day or two ago. I thought "isn't that basically what ripple does, except on a 'private chain' and therefore both prior art and obvious?" AFAIU, the USPTO only searches their own database; other people have to explain that prior published art exists and that 'but on a private chain' and 'but on a blockchain' are very similar to 'but on a PC'. Without reading the patent application, I'll have to rely on someone else to compare this patent application with, say, a dated copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bitcoinpriorart https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bitcoinpriorart